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U.S. Businesses Find Welcome Surprises in Tax Bill [WSJ]
“If someone would have said 11 months ago, by the end of the year we’d able to produce a bill and get it to the president’s desk that does these things, skepticism would have been sky high.” That’s not Speaker of the House Paul Ryan or another GOP member of Congress; no, that’s Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And you get the distinct impression that his role in crafting this tax bill wasn’t insignificant.

Elsewhere: The New York Times tax bill calculator will help you find out how individuals fare. The outcome is less certain than that for big business.

Prepaying 2018 state income taxes is blocked in GOP bill [CNBC]
So much for that idea. Although the possibility was always considered a longshot.

Companies Can CEOs, CFOs for High Tax Rates [CFO]
Another study validates that old accountant joke. The authors write: “Specifically CEOs who do not avoid enough tax are more likely to be forced out. Unlike the effect of avoiding too much tax, the … result of avoiding too little tax holds throughout our sample period.”

It Took Five Decades to Build Steinhoff. It Cratered in Two Days [Bloomberg]
If you’re a company that discovers some accounting irregularities, a good course of action would be to talk about those irregularities. A CEO of an investment manager makes it plain: “People were expecting an explanation from Steinhoff. Instead we got nothing. In the absence of any real information, you tend to assume the worst.”

From a top accountant and political candidate to ‘drug addict’ facing DEATH ROW in Bali [DM]
File to Accountants Behaving Badly: Don’t travel with 6 grams of ecstasy and 14 grams of meth in your luggage.

Previously, on Going Concern…

We opened a safe space for all the CPA exam candidates expecting scores.

In Open Items, a Big 4 tax associate asks about moving to a local firm “with some real estate specialization,” and if that will ” make myself marketable whenever I decide to look for that new position?”

In other news:

Private equity groups sell assets at fastest pace since crisis

Chasing the Next Bitcoin, Investors Shell Out $700 Million for Coins With ‘No Purpose’

“Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. It’s a powerful and potentially sinister collector of personal data, a propaganda partner to government censors, and an enabler of discriminatory advertising.”

A Critical Analysis of Bob Dylan’s 2017 Xmas Lights

Behold The Most Hilarious Wildlife Photos of 2017

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The post Accounting News Roundup: Big Business Is Happy; The Goldilocks Zone for Tax Avoidance; Steinhoff’s Silence | 12.19.16 appeared first on Going Concern.